Porridge

Whiplash: A Queer Theory Investigation Of Jazz Music – Rhi Storer

Rhi Storer is a politics graduate from the University of Birmingham, and an aspiring digital data journalist. Her academic interests include the intersection of cultural theory and data for a new radical journalism, musicology, and critical theory. She tweets @rhistorerwrites Outside of academia, she enjoys jazz, painting, poetry, and rock climbing. Don’t forget the…

TWO POEMS – James Carroll

James Carroll is a twenty-three year old English Literature Masters student at the University of Leeds. His work has featured in multiple Leeds art publications, including The Scribe, Heir and his mother’s fridge. He is currently writing a novel about the relationship between sport and men’s mental health, and no poem could ever mean more…

ONE POEM – Damon Moore

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash Damon Moore runs an arts project in Frome, Somerset. He has a particular interest in the narrative style but his short-form poetry has found a home in RAUM, The Literateur, Eyot and Forage amongst others. He is travelling somewhere in Europe at present and gathering material for ’28Articles’, a Brexit related poetry-film…

TWO POEMS – Kristin Garth

Photo by David Becker on Unsplash Kristin Garth is a Pushcart & Best of the Net nominated sonnet stalker. Her poetry has stalked magazines like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Former Cactus, Occulum & many more. She has four chapbooks including Shakespeare for Sociopaths (Hedgehog Poetry Press). She has another forthcoming, Puritan U (Rhythm & Bones Press March 2019). Her…

Women on the Ward: Implications of Confinement and Collective Identity in Selima Hill’s Lou-Lou – Imogen Shaw

Imogen Shaw is an environmental lobbyist and final year Creative Writing MA student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has appeared in several online and print journals, including The Mays and Blueprint magazine. She is passionate about social advocacy and lives in a London flat with her fiancée and a tenacious family of mice. You can follow…

COMFORT FOODS // Pasul – Nora Selmani

Hello and welcome to the first edition of Comfort Foods! In the academic arena, Food Studies is an incredibly rich interdisciplinary field which looks to delineate much of the things we’d like to discuss here – predominantly, the relationship between food and culture – while grounding food in its social, political and even scientific context….

ONE POEM – Frances Tuoriniemi

Photo by Stoica Ionela on Unsplash Frances Tuoriniemi is a MA Writing student at Warwick. They particularly enjoy work that plays with colour and feels alive, work that moves and shifts to hide and expose. They have previously been published by Gravel Magazine and Tangerine Magazine. This poem was also featured in Issue Two of Porridge, available for purchase here….

TWO POEMS – Elden Morrow

Image: Marc Chagall, ‘The Flying Carriage’, 1913 Elden Morrow is a recent MA in Literature and Culture graduate from the University of Birmingham. He loves the poetry of Frank O’Hara and Gerard Manley Hopkins (who he wrote his dissertation on), and is particularly interested in poetry where there are abrupt shifts in tone and dialect….

TWO POEMS – Howie Good

Image: Oskar Kokoschka, Knight Errant – 1915 Howie Good’s latest collections are ‘I’m Not a Robot’ from Tolsun Books and ‘A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel’ from Analog Submissions Press. Can We Just Get an Algorithm to Do This for Us? A man walks onto an abandoned railroad bridge and announces, “I’m going to kill myself.”…

The Stork – Chris Di Placito

Image: Joan Miró, Landscape (The Hare) – 1927 Chris Di Placito is a writer living in Fife, Scotland. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in magazines such as Litro, BULL, Ink In Thirds, STORGY and Structo. The Stork Business is slow in Big Boabby’s Burgers and ah sit alone in the furthest away booth….

Five Baked Beans – Katy Thornton

Image: Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash Katy Thornton has just graduated with a First Class Honours in her MA in Creative Writing in December, and is currently working on short fiction, as well as a longer piece of work about the Magdalene Laundries in the 1980s. Her hobbies include mostly reading and writing, as well…

TWO POEMS – Seán Kennedy

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash Seán Kennedy is a twenty-three-year-old writer from Ireland whose poetry has previously appeared in the online edition of Porridge, as well as in online journals Dodging the Rain, The Honest Ulsterman, and The Bangor Literary Journal. He began writing poetry in 2017 after finishing an MA in English at…

ONE POEM – Frederick Pollack

Image: Konstantin Yuon – New Planet (1921) Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness (Story Line Press), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Many of his other poems have appeared in print and online journals. Question…

Sexism in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard – Dan Morey

Dan Morey is a freelance writer in Pennsylvania. He’s worked as a book critic, nightlife columnist, travel correspondent and outdoor journalist. His writing has appeared in Hobart, decomP, McSweeney’s Quarterly and elsewhere. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find him at danmorey.weebly.com. Sexism in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard A conversation is needed. A freewheeling debate. So I…

SHORT STORY – D. M. Kerr

Image: Henri Matisse, 1907, Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) D. M. Kerr is the writing name of a Canadian writer currently living and working in Singapore, where he teaches game design and business. His work has been published recently in Founders Favourites, in the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library’s So It Goes magazine and in Page and…

Frederic Manning and the Greatest War Novel of all Time – Malcolm St Hill

Image: A Star Shell – Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, 1916 Malcolm St Hill lives in Newcastle, Australia and is a poet, reviewer and independent researcher focused on the literary memory of the Great War, particularly the work of Australian soldier-poets. Frederic Manning and the Greatest War Novel of all Time The Australian poet and…

Bubba – Kaylie Saidin

Image: Richard Westall – The Artist’s Wife as Sappho Kaylie Saidin lives in New Orleans, where she studies English literature and is an editor at the Maroon. She was the winner of the 2018 Dawson Gaillard Award for Fiction and the 2018 Monroe Library Research Competition. Her work is published or is forthcoming in The…

TWO POEMS – Jamie Stedmond

Image: Alice Bailly – Self Portrait (1917) Jamie Stedmond is a young Irish writer, currently based in Dublin. Jamie is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin. Previously published or forthcoming in The Bohemyth, Dodging the Rain, The Cabinet of Heed, Cold Coffee Stand, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Crossways Literary Magazine, Cagibi, ZeroFlash,…

Where I Lived – Robert Boucheron

Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, NY. He has worked as an architect in New York City and Charlottesville, VA. His short stories and essays appear in Bangalore Review, Fiction International, The Fiction Pool, Litro, London Journal of Fiction, New Haven Review, Short Fiction. Where I Lived As the Great Recession brought construction to a standstill…

THREE POEMS – DS Maolalai

Image: Andre Derain – Charing Cross Bridge (1906) DS Maolalai is a poet from Ireland who has been writing and publishing poetry for almost 10 years. His first collection, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press, and he has a second collection forthcoming from Turas Press in 2019. He has…

TWO POEMS – Ian C. Smith

Image: Faye Goodwin (1931-2005) Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, Australian Poetry Journal, Critical Survey, Live Encounters, The Stony Thursday Book, and Two-Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania. Police informer’s last rites He imagined eyes…

An interview with Nora Selmani

Nora Selmani is a writer and poet based in London, an MA student in Comparative Literature at Kings College London and an Arts & Humanities editor at Porridge. We caught up with Nora to find out more about her first collection of poetry, Portraits, which has recently been released by the Cardiff-based publisher Lumin. In Portraits,…

Horsing Around: Performative Media and Yuan Art – Chris Rouse

Chris Rouse is Porridge‘s Non-Fiction Editor. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, researching representations of East Asia in medieval European maps and travel literature. He has a keen interest in interdisciplinarity, global history and the history of ideas and ideologies. In his spare time he can often be found in old churches making bad…

ART – Nathalie Tierce

Nathalie Tierce was born in New York City and studied illustration at the High School of Art and Design and went on to receive a BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. After graduating she worked extensively as a scenic artist in England painting backings for film and The BBC she settled in Los Angeles. This…

TWO POEMS – Charley Barnes

Image: Lee Krasner – The Seasons (1957) Charley Barnes is a Worcester-based poet and author who has recently gained her Doctorate degree in Creative Writing and now spends her days wondering what to do with it. Charley’s debut short story collection, The Women You Were Warned About, was published in May 2017, and her debut…

The Chore of the Text – Robert Boucheron

This essay by Robert Boucheron is also featured in Issue Two of Porridge, available for purchase here. Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, New York. He has worked as an architect in New York City and since 1987 in Charlottesville, Virginia. His short stories and essays appear in Bellingham Review, Fiction International, London Journal…

PHOTOGRAPHY – Jim Zola

Jim Zola has worked in a warehouse, as a security guard, in a bookstore, as a teacher for deaf children, as a toy designer for Fisher-Price, and currently as a children’s librarian. Published in many journals through the years, his publications include a chapbook — ‘The One Hundred Bones of Weather’ (Blue Pitcher Press) — and…

TWO POEMS – Martina Reisz Newberry

Image: Claude Cahun – Untitled (1937) Martina Reisz Newberry’s latest books are: NEVER COMPLETELY AWAKE (Available from Deerbrook Editions) and TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME (Available from Unsolicited Press). Her work has been widely published in the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Brian, a Media Creative. White Italian When…

TWO POEMS – Ella Cunningham

Image: Edward Hopper, Railroad Sunset (1929) Ella Cunningham graduated from University of Birmingham last year, having studied English with Creative writing and specialising in poetry in her final year. Her dissertation focused on making love poetry more accessible and in-line with the digital age, along with attempting to normalise and de-sensationalise LGBTQ relationships in love…

SHORT STORY – Alisha Mughal

This short story by Alisha Mughal appeared in the second print issue of Porridge which is available for purchase here. Alisha Mughal’s work has appeared previously in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Nottingham Review, and Bad Pony Magazine. She has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Toronto, and she currently resides in Ontario, Canada. She was born…

SHORT STORY – Anita Goveas

This short story by Anita Goveas appeared in our second print issue which is available for purchase here. Anita Goveas is British-Asian, based in London, and fueled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, most recently in former cactus mag, Litro, New Flash Fiction Review,…

ART – Gavin Shepherdson

This artwork by Gavin is also featured in Issue Two of Porridge, available for purchase here. Gavin Shepherdson is a designer and artist from Lanchester, Durham. He studied Animation at Northumbria University and has exhibited short films at Ani’mest and Vilnius Festival among others. This will be his first publication for his artwork. His interests include…

SHORT STORY – John Herbert

Image: Esteban Vicente – Bridgehampton Rose (1970) This short story by John Herbert appeared in our second print issue, which is available for purchase here. John Herbert is an English teacher from Brighton, UK, holds a PhD in modernist fiction from the University of Birmingham, and is an alumnus of New Writing South’s Creative Writing…

ONE POEM – Loisa Fenichell

Loisa Fenichell is a Brooklyn-based middle school special education teacher. She recently received her BFA from the aptly named Purchase College, located in Purchase, NY, where she studied Creative Writing and Literature. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including Pink Monkey Magazine, Gandy Dancer, The Rising Phoenix Review, Electric Cereal, and Winter Tangerine Magazine….

ART – Hendrika Seguro-Bigg

This artwork by Hendrika is also featured in Issue Two of Porridge, available for purchase here. Hendrika Seguro-Bigg is an English Literature and Philosophy graduate from the University of Birmingham. Issue Two of Porridge was her first print publication, though she hopes to continue creating, taking inspiration from the world and its people as she leaves for travel…

PHOTOGRAPHY – Keith Moul

Keith Moul is a poet of place, a photographer of the distinction of place. His digital photos strive for a colourful vision with their high contrast and saturation. Both his poems and photos are published widely and available on his website, http://poemsphotosmoul.blogspot.com. Lost Lip (2012) The Arches Provincial Park, Newfoundland Ran Out of…

ONE POEM – Ian C. Smith

Image: Willem de Kooning – Valentine (1947) Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, Australian Poetry Journal, Critical Survey, Live Encounters, The Stony Thursday Book, and Two-Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania. Ambrose in…

SHORT STORY – Christopher S. Bell

Christopher S. Bell has been writing and releasing literary and musical works through My Idea of Fun since 2008. His sound projects include Emmett and Mary, Technological Epidemic, C. Scott and the Beltones and Fine Wives. My Idea of Fun is an art and music archive focused on digital preservation with roots in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. (www.myideaoffun.org). Christopher’s work…

ART REVIEW: Where Privacy Meets Paranoia – Melissa Mesku

Melissa Mesku is a writer and editor in NYC. Where Privacy Meets Paranoia Bushwick artist builds a space for viewers to contemplate privacy “There’s people in your head,” artist Thierry Laurent explains, pointing to a silkscreen collage, one in his series of five called The Unknown. The image is dominated by an Illuminati-like eye. Below it,…

TWO POEMS – Josephine Greenland

Josephine Greenland is a British-Swedish writer holding an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. A prose writer at heart, she is currently working on her first novel. When not writing, she can be seen wandering in the mountains or playing her violin. U-nomia A biological cartographer in a bracken of unclassifieds…

An interview with Wanda Deglane

Wanda Deglane is a psychology/family & human development student at Arizona State University whose poetry has been published or is forthcoming on Dodging the Rain, Rust + Moth, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. Earlier this year, Wanda self-published her first book of poetry, Rainlily. Here, we find out more about Wanda’s journey into self-publishing and dig into the…